Powerful Tools for Self-Leadership

Self-leadership is the learned ability to intentionally “run our own brains” for a particular purpose. It is about better managing our mental and emotional states to enhance our performance to achieve the things that are meaningful and important to us. This course provides the framework and experiential tools to align and focus how you think, feel, and behave to be in high performance states, or what we call “genius” or “flow” states. It shows you how to achieve flow states to enhance your leadership performance.

This course covers “state management”, the critical key to enhancing your self-leadership. It introduces fourteen self-leadership tools that help participants learn how to develop their own genius states. The tools include those for identifying and moving toward your highest intentions on what you want to achieve, and others for dealing with internal conflicts or excuses you might encounter. Each new tool builds on the results of the previous ones. You will learn about each tool, and get practice using it. These tools have been modelled from leaders that effectively use them.

What area would you like to enhance your self-leadership and develop optimal performance states? Would you like to be “in the zone” when you write, speak, lead, negotiate, coach, or in some other area important to you? Do you feel like you know a particular area well but have trouble performing within it to your highest potential? You have a choice of selecting one area to work on, like leading a team, writing, speaking, climbing or selecting several areas.

This course is a three day program of lectures, demonstrations, discussions, and experiential exercises. Although the training is for professionals interested in enhancing their self-leadership skills, it is also for those who want to be certified as meta-coaches. It serves as Module II of the Meta-Coaching certification in Neuro-Semantics, a discipline whose primary focus is to actualize excellence in individuals, companies and communities.

“Learning Leadership: Our Approach to Training” by Joe Brodnicki

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO LEAD A TRAINING?

Leading the way in a training takes more than an inspiring vision and a clear path. It takes a certain amount of courage, vulnerability, and compassion for those you lead. Yet, many corporate trainers I meet are quite content with delivering a body of knowledge and, maybe, having their audience like them. To them leading is a mechanical process that is a set of tricks and techniques.

I encounter so many trainers who prefer to keep their emotional distance from their learners. While they would never admit it, they say things like, “I really don’t want to hear what they think about their work or their lives. That’s just a waste of time;” or “I just need to get in there, keep them entertained and tell them what they need to know.” Their “stage” separates them from their learners and they neither care for, nor cultivate much engagement among themselves, their learners, and their content.

WHY IS LEARNING LEADERSHIP IMPORTANT?

Training aims to bridge the gap between the learner’s desired performance and current performance. Leading a learning experience not only facilitates passage through the gap, but also often requires the leader create the gap itself. As an effective trainer, one must tap into the motivations and imagination of the participants while helping them identify and overcome the internal and external barriers that get in the way.

In transitioning from the present state of the participant’s knowledge and skills to the desired state, we like to begin with outcomes. The outcomes go beyond training objectives. Building learner awareness around the objectives and their value ups the ante and unleashes motivation to make the desired change that the training content requires. The real value lies in putting the skills and knowledge to good use. To get there, a trainer needs to facilitate the learner’s journey starting with their problems (the things that get in the way) and then surfacing and dealing with the problems’ symptoms and causes. Now, the trainer has set the stage to supply and unleash the resources and techniques to bridge the gap between present and desired states of the participants.

Training becomes a do-with process. The trainer and the group pass through the gap together in a dynamic set of processes. A learning leader helps participants encounter their reality and create value. Yet, training often fails to provide much value. I was in a training seminar on training evaluation when one presenter, Robert Brinkerhoff, dropped a bomb on group. He explained that, in his years of experience and research, in most corporate training only 20% of the attendees get any real value. By real value, he meant that these people learned the material and had success in using it to make a positive difference in their work or lives.

Think about that. Most training is a waste of time; resources (both training costs and salary) make very little real difference once everyone walks out the door. How do we change these numbers and lead our groups through the gap?

HOW WE ADD VALUE TO THE PARTICIPANTS IN OUR TRAININGS

Our role as learning leaders goes way being teaching techniques, entertaining our group, and getting them to like us. We are facilitators who, with our participants, co-create skills, insights, contexts, and applications that create more than just a good learning experience. Leading learning requires getting “down in the dirt” with our learners and co-creating results that matter.
We set some frames to achieve this:

Frame Number One: The participant defines and creates the value criteria. The clearer each participant, and maybe even the whole group, is on their value criteria, the more successful the training will be. It is never enough to ask the participants to write down their expectations. Quite often, we get people who are not quite sure of what the training offers or, even, why they are there in the first place.

Frame Two: Outframe the training. Whether we are doing a corporate or public training, we take our event from “just another training” to something special, We may have the participants create frames that reflect variations of Robert Dilts’ vision “of creating a world worth belonging to.” We might begin with questions like:

“What would it be like if you created a life where you were ready to jump out of bed each morning and do something that matters?”
“What would it be like for you were better able to handle the challenges of the job and be a leader who makes a real difference?”
If we are dealing with a group who does not feel like they really can make a difference. We may first, set a frame of “You may not totally buy into the idea, but start with an attitude of anything is possible. Perhaps this training will give you the chance to identify and overcome a few of the barriers that get in the way of making even a little progress.”

If they are having trouble with buying into that idea, then we might start by asking the group the future pace questions and discuss the answers like these: “Can you make a difference?” and “What would happen if you chose to make a difference?” This is a risky intervention from group dynamics standpoint, but the choice as a learning leader is to ask the tough questions or deal with a group in which many of the people do not see a value to the training.

Frame Three: We Abdicate our throne, putting our ego on the shelf, and accept the learners’ world just as it is. Like me, you may have run across some trainers who stopped pursuing excellence and became legends in their own mind. Quite likely, they do not make a lot of contact with their groups’ world and do not hold their groups in nearly as high regard as they hold themselves. They embody the “Sage on the stage” frame. They are the keepers the knowledge and the “secrets,” and the group is dependent on them to show them the light. Abraham Maslow wrote that,

“If we want to be helpers, counselors, therapists, teachers, guides, or psychotherapists, what we must do is to accept the person, and help him learn what kind of person he is already, what is his style, what are his aptitudes, what is he good for, not good for, what can we build upon, what are his good raw materials, his good potentialities.” (From: Maslow, Abraham (1970) Motivation and Personality quoted in Hall, L. Michael, The Crucible and the Fires of Change, page 170.)

Here are some ideas adapted from The Crucible and the Fires of Change that I have found useful in connecting with group members:

Cultivate the sense of curiosity and pure awareness that enable the participants to discover their potential to decide what is truly valuable to them, and then supply the means to help them realize that value.

Accept what we get from the group without judgement. Acknowledge them neutrally, authentically, and honestly. We can still hold standards and speak honestly without creating a “love puddle” of blind endorsement.

Instructor Team

Pascal Gambardella, PhD, ACMC, NLP/Neuro-Semantic Trainer

Pascal is a licensed Neuro-Semantic Trainer, and an Associate Certified Meta-Coach (ACMC). As a trainer he is known for his humor and his ability to explain complex ideas. He works within many disciplines and enjoys applying what he learns in one discipline to another. Professionally, he is a master modeler, who has modeled physical phenomena, satellite motion, and the behavior of people, organizations, and corporations. He is President of Emerging Perspectives LLC. He is also President of the Institute of Neuro-Semantics USA, an association of all licensed Neuro-Semantic trainers in the USA and Canada.

He is co-author of the book: “Systemic Coaching: Coaching the Whole Person with Meta-Coaching” (Hall, Gambardella, 2012), and contributed chapters and clarifying diagrams, concept maps, and mind maps to may Neuro-Semantic books. He co-chairs the Psychology and Human Behavior Special Interest Group (SIG) of the System Dynamics Society. Within the System Dynamics community he is involved in exploring ways of incorporating psychological and sociological variables in computer simulations, and applying system dynamics to teaching history.

He holds a PhD in Physics (1977) from SUNY at Stony Brook, and a more recent Master’s Degree in System Dynamics (2011) from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). He lives in Silver Spring, Maryland USA (near Washington DC). He holds coaching credentials from the Meta-Coach Foundation. He received his certification as a Neuro-Semantic/NLP trainer in 2004.

In 2014, he retired from Computer Sciences Corporation after a 37 year career as a scientist, senior business architect, and corporate methodologist. While at CSC, he worked on contracts for many government agencies, including NASA, IRS, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), and the Department of Defense.

Joe Brodnicki, ACMC, ACC, NLP/Neuro-Semantic Trainer

As a coach, trainer, and consultant specializing in personal and organizational change, Joe Brodnicki understands the importance of finding a compelling vision of what his clients really want and finding and solving the underlying problems that get in the way. After a successful career dealing with medical claims processing systems, the deaths of several people close to him led Joe to the realization that many people never achieved their best or the types of lives their talents and spirits craved.

Joe has worked in the public and private sector to help his clients achieve the results that are important to them while adding to their personal satisfaction with their careers and personal lives. During his time with the federal government, he received numerous commendations for his contributions to Reinventing Government, building partnership, and creating powerful teams.

Both Joe’s coaching and training clients appreciate his ability to support and challenge them in areas that are important to them while bringing a sense of humor and playfulness to the process.

Joe first received his certification as an NLP trainer in 2004 and added a license in as a Neuro-Semantic/NLP trainer. He also holds coaching credentials from the International Coach Federation and the Meta-Coach Foundation.